Late night kings stick together!!!
Jimmy Kimmel has sounded off about the cancellation of 'The Late Show with Stephe Colbert' and is standing alongside the former soon to be ex-late night host.
Speaking with Variety, Kimmel had this to say:
You’ve put up a billboard on Santa Monica and La Cienega declaring you’re voting for Stephen Colbert this year. What’s your mindset behind that?
Well, it seems like voting for Stephen is the least we could do at this point, and I think it will be a nice statement if he does win. Obviously, awards don’t mean much, but every once in a while they do, and in this case, I think it will. So I fully expect Stephen to win the Emmy as I think people are very, very upset about what happened to him and his show.
You’ve shown great camaraderie with the other late-night hosts, especially during the Colbert situation. Talk about those friendships.
We are really close. We became especially close during the strike. We had long, fun conversations about how to handle the situation and decided to do a podcast. Now it’s a text chain — a frequent one. I think we were all shocked and disappointed that this kind of thing is happening in America, and also disappointed that we don’t see more people on the right stepping up and saying, “Hey, this is no good.” Silencing comedians, commentators, whatever you want to call people… I have to say, if Joe Biden had used his muscle to get Sean Hannity kicked off the air, you may be surprised to learn that I would not support that. I would, in fact, support Sean Hannity in that situation, because I thought one of the founding principles of this country was free speech. But people don’t seem to care about protecting it unless you agree with them.
There have been reports that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year. What’s your take on that?
I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert‘s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical. These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know they don’t know what they’re talking about. They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions — probably in total billions — and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows. It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year? I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.
Why should people vote for Stephen Colbert at the Emmys?
He’s not just a sweet man. He is very moral — he’s a very ethical person. He is the salt of the earth. He is a humble person and an extremely smart person. I hope that whatever he does next is even more powerful than what he’d been doing. And I think that’s very possible.